Reading #3: “Those Look Similar!” Issues in Automating Gesture Design Advice (Long)

Summary

Here a gesture design tool called quill is introduced. Chris Long, James Landay and Lawrence Rowe, the authors, have incorporated similarity mechanisms to detect both similarities of gestures in human perception and in computer recognition. The human perception part is performed using experimental tests data from different human subjects. The similarity in computer recognition can be measured with the classification probability or other methods.

Their system similar to Rubine’s will let the user define new gestures and provide examples for each. The classification method is also similar to Rubine’s. The authors describe that deciding the advice timing and comprehensiveness was a challenge. The advice giving system was implemented as a background process which can be called up by the user or start automatically after some idle period. Since the background process takes some time, if called up by the user, it will lock the actions that might stale the analysis result. If it was run automatically, user actions which affect its result will cancel the analysis.

Finally the authors brought about the ideas of automatically morphing similar gestures or checking the user entered gestures against standard databases.

Discussion

I think the facilities incorporated in this gesture design kit is thoughtful especially the human perception similarity measurements. The paper did not elaborate on the classifier technicalities but it is implicit the classifier is similar to Rubine’s.